Due to a battery fail and AppleCare I am without my MacBook for up to a week. This gives me a wonderful opportunity to think things through without the distractions of certain pieces of creative software at my fingertips.

It will also highlight how much time I am wasting, not working on projects, but just ‘browsing’ from app to app. I will use the time to be ruthless and relentless and remove apps on the iPad and iPhone. There are far too many that I don’t, or shouldn’t use.

In addition I’ll have time to meander with a pen and paper. I do this a lot, but my ‘analogue’ journaling gets squeezed between those digital moments. Returning to pen and paper is as important for my creative mind as several hours lost in Logic Pro or Scrivener. I can make connections between ideas with greater fluidity on paper… is that the digital Holy Grail, or, if it ain’t broke…?

Make the most of what at first appears a productive disaster. I may have lost an important tool for the a while, but the workman can still build.

There was no pressure to share what was created, but there was a Facebook group and related hashtag used across social sites. I have been sharing my pages, a rather cathartic process, both in the group and here.

Here are the final set of pages I created. I have found the process helpful and will continue to art journal as much as I can. It will be interesting to see how easy that is without the prompts.

That’s January’s created challenge complete. Next is February and the attempt to write 14 songs in 28 days… I may take a creative break for a day though.